Architecture-Centric Quality Engineering form Software Product Lines

The product line approach to software development is based on the systematic, large-scale reuse of development artifacts such as architecture, design, and components between a set of functional similar products. It promises, among others, to shorten the development time of software systems and to significantly reduce development and maintenance costs. In order to achieve the promised improvements, however, the components and artifacts intended for reuse must be of high quality. Therefore, more than for traditional software development, quality engineering (i.e., constructive and analytical activities performed to assure the quality of development artifacts and end products) becomes a very crucial part of every software product line effort. Even though quality engineering